Since the beginning, there were Songbird nightlies available to test out new features and develop add-ons for future versions. There were both branch and trunk builds released each day – later they decided to only provide trunk builds. As of now they seem to build branch builds again for version 2.1.0.

Nightingale’s case is particular, we didn’t have build servers like POTI does when starting the project. Fortunately, we are now setting up buildbots to compile and upload nightly builds every day, if there are changes in the source code.

To begin with, three build servers are provided by Antoine (GeekShadow):

For now we are only building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch which is version 1.12 but matches Songbird trunk (2.2). We chose to rename to version to “1.12″ mostly because there are no major changes between the Songbird trunk (2.2) and 1.11 since POTI is mostly bumping up the version numbers for their closed-source work.

Some technical notes :

Unlike Mozilla and POTI, we have decided not to use Buildbot since it’s much too complex for our needs. Instead, we are using our own bash scripts available on GitHub. They are easy to use and modify

Whether you’re a developer wanting to build the next generation of add-ons or a user not afraid of the freshest and sometimes very unstable changes, Grab a Nightly Build and let us know what you think!